U.S. Patent D670,713, granted to Apple by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last Tuesday, depicts "the ornamental design for a display screen or portion thereof with animated-graphical user interface.

The description section of the patent is rather ambiguous. So the easiest way of depicting what the patent covers it to simply show the figure:

[Image Source: USPTO]

Google Inc. (GOOG) is surely a little irked as it filed a highly similar patent request half a year earlier in May 2011 (Apple's patent was filed in Dec. 2011). US 2012/0105464 A1 depicts "Animated Page Turning", albeit describing it in much more detailed and specific language than Apple's filing. To add insult to injury, Apple's patent does not cite Google's prior art.

Ultimately, the ambiguous language of the later Apple patent may work to its advantage, as it may be able to justify filing more lawsuits to stifle its competitors.

Apple's wins in court when suing its competitors have thus far come largely from its local Californian district court. In its $1.05B USD victory over Samsung Electronics Comp., Ltd. (KSC:005930), the jury found Apple innocent of all alleged infringements, but found Samsung guilty of most of the infringements Apple alleged. Coincidentally the family members of some jurors were Apple shareholders, but Judge Lucy Koh ruled this was an acceptable level of bias.

BaHaaabahaaa This is nothing compared to what Monsanto is up to. Change some DNA in a cow and they own the copyrights to the cow. Every time a farmer breeds his stock Monsanto gets royalty. This isn't just about cows either, their trying for any animal in the food chain. The USA is going crazy, how long before it implodes.

I actually heard someone Copyrighted their own genetically altered crops, after one year some of the seed from his own farm had been blown by the wind in to a neighbouring farm and he then proceeded to sue the other farmer for growing his copyrighted crops and he won.